INDIA JOINS NATIONS WHICH DON’T EXECUTE MENTALLY ILL CONVICTS
India Joins Nations Which Don’t Execute
Mentally Ill Convicts
NEW DELHI: In a landmark judgment
catapulting India into a league of nations that don’t execute lunatics, the
Supreme Court has barred the execution of a person if he develops a mental
illness and loses cognitive power during post-conviction imprisonment.
Courts across the world, including India, have historically
considered mental illness as a mitigating circumstance for imposition of
lenient sentences as the offender, because of his mental incapacity, seldom
knows the consequences of his action, which becomes a crime.
But
this is the first time that the SC, through a bench of Justices N V Ramana, M M
Shantanagoudar and Indira Banerjee, took note that punishment is a
communication from the sentencing system to the criminal about the consequences
of his action. When a condemned prisoner loses cognitive power because of
postconviction mental illness, the essence of that communication — consequences
of the crime — is lost, it said.
Writing the judgment for the
bench, Justice Ramana said, “The notion of death penalty and the sufferance it
brings along causes incapacitation and is idealised to invoke a sense of
deterrence. If the accused is not able to understand the impact and purpose of
his execution because of his disability, the raison d’etre for the execution
itself collapses.”
“When such a disability occurs,
a person may not be in a position to understand the implications of his actions
and the consequences it entails. In this situation, the execution of such a
person would lower the majesty of lawThis judgment came in a petition seeking
review of the SC’s 2008 ruling in which it had upheld the death penalty awarded
by the trial court and Bombay HC to a person, referred to as “X” by the court,
for sexually assaulting and murdering two minor girls in December 1999 at
Gulumb in Maharashtra. While relieving him of execution, the SC ordered that he
should be kept in jail till death as given the serious crime, it would not be
safe to send him back to society even though he has spent 20 years in prison,
17 of them on death row.
Realising that this ruling
could be misused, the SC warned that post-conviction mental illness could not
be used as a ruse by condemned prisoners to escape the noose. “This ground
needs to be utilised only in extreme cases of mental illness… only extreme
cases of convicts being mentally ill are not executed,” the bench said.
“This court cautions against
utilisation of this dicta as a ruse to escape the gallows by pleading such
defence even if such ailment is not of grave severity,” it said. The Justice
Ramana -led bench laid down the test of post-conviction severe mental illness
as a ground for non-execution of condemned prisoners. “The test envisaged
herein predicates that the offender needs to have a severe mental illness or
disability, which simply means that a medical professional would objectively
consider the illness to be most serious so that he cannot understand or
comprehend the nature and purpose behind the imposition of death penalty.
These disorders generally
include schizophrenia, other serious psychotic disorders, and dissociative
disorders with schizophrenia,” the SC said. Justices Ramana, Shantanagoudar and
Banerjee discussed in detail judgments from the US and UK Supreme Courts on
this issue besides taking note of the related global judicial trends on
post-conviction mental illness of condemned prisoners.
They said, “It is a
well-acknowledged fact throughout the world that prisons are difficult places
to be in. The World Health Organisation and the International Red Cross
identify that multiple circumstances such as overcrowding, various forms of
violence, enforced solitude, lack of privacy, inadequate healthcare facilities,
concerns about family etc can take a toll on the mental health of prisoners.”
The SC said, “Due to prevailing lack
of awareness about such issues, the prisoners have no recourse and their mental
health keeps on degrading day by day. The prevailing argument in favour of such
prisoners is that — whether imposition of death penalty upon such prisoners is
justified, who have clearly impaired their abilities to even understand the
nature and purpose of such punishment and the reason for such imposition?
MANISHANKAR
CEO-ANTI-CORRUPTION AND HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT®-CHENNAI
Email: anticorruption.org2007@gmail.com.
Mobile: 91 9087856137
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